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TheGift73 writes in with news about an over-the-counter HIV test getting the backing of a panel of FDA experts. "American consumers may soon be able to test themselves for the virus that causes AIDS in the privacy of their own homes, after a panel of experts on Tuesday recommended approval of the first rapid, over-the-counter HIV test. The 17 members of the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted unanimously that the benefits of the OraQuick HIV test outweigh its potential risks for consumers. While the test, which uses a mouth swab to return a result in 20 minutes, does not appear to be as accurate as professionally-administered diagnostics, panelists said it could provide an important way to expand HIV testing. The FDA will make its final decision on whether to approve the product later this year, weighing the opinion of the panel."

eldavojohn writes "The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution is a comprehensive snapshot of the latest research of biological evolution. The text is written by Eugene V. Koonin, an editor for a journal and researcher at NCBI. The book, although lacking in foundational knowledge and often foregoing explanation of research, presents a comprehensive and well-referenced view of modern evolutionary research. It is heavily laden with acronyms and jargon specific to biology and evolution. As a result, reading it requires either prior knowledge or a high tolerance for looking up these advanced topics with the reward of it being an extremely eye opening and enjoyable read worthy of your time." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review. The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution author Eugene V. Koonin pages 516 publisher FT Press Science rating 7/10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0132542494 summary An outline of a fundamentally new evolutionary synthesis reflecting key advances in genomics, systems biology and biological physics. First off, my background is primarily in computer science although I took courses in bioinformatics in my undergrad and have maintained an interest in evolution since evolutionary and genetic algorithms were supposed to revolutionize computer science when I was in school. Unfortunately, my lack of biology caused the text to be extremely tedious (so much googling) for some chapters while my strong statistical background made other chapters very much enjoyable. For most readers this presents a large barrier of entry. When the author discusses neural networks being used to categorize prokaryotic genes, it may be insufficient to the reader to understand what that means. As a result, this book's audience is a relatively small set of people: 1) biology graduates with strong statistical knowledge or 2) someone willing to work very hard to understand advanced terms and concepts in both fields. Please proceed knowing that a biologist's review of this same book could very well sound entirely different from mine. Also, Koonin wastes very few words in this book, the text is dense and if you are unable to complete reading this review due to jargon there is a low chance you'll be able to tolerate it in the book. To sample some of this book, there is a short PDF containing chapter one or Google Books offering the first 147 pages at the time of this writing — you will see that this review barely scratches the surface of what is covered in this information-dense book.

Secondly, I will preface my review of the technical aspects of this book with my reason for giving it a score of 7 out of 10. The introduction to this book sets very lofty goals. One of them being the hope that this book does for evolution what A Brief History of Time did for physics. That is a seriously tall order and gave me correspondingly high hopes for this book. Koonin, unfortunately, is a very gifted writer and is unafraid of using exceedingly complex sentences such as this gem from page 117 (deliberately taken out of context):

"It has been known for years that a widespread form of global regulation in bacteria is mediated by cAMP, with the participation of diverse adenylate cyclases (a striking case of NOGD); numerous proteins containing cAMP sensors, such as the GAF domain; and the CRP, FNR, and other transcription regulators, also containing cAMP-binding domains."

That sentence is typical of Koonin's writing — lengthy and intricately peppered with many acronyms (only one of which had been described well enough for me earlier in the text). Of course, that paragraph comes with a reference to a paper (like almost all of the paragraphs in this book) from 2010 by Seshasayee so the reader is free to seek external resources if these sentences are daunting.

Considering all of this, I read A Brief History of Time in high school and, despite not having had a physics course yet, learned a lot from it. I attribute that, mostly, to the fact that the sentences are simple and straightforward. Not only that but A Brief History of Time did a great job of building upward from the foundational mechanics of physics while somehow remaining refreshingly brief. This is not the case in The Logic of Chance but I will rush to the book's defense somewhat on that charge. Prior to having read this book, I would have stated my desire that the text start from the basics and work its way up. After reading this book and understanding this field better than I ever have, I now agree that the subject matter of evolution would demand quite the epic tome to accomplish such a feat. I do hope to see future versions of this book with more concise and clear sentences as well as more fundamental concepts explained. If I could have begged Koonin to add one thing to this book, it would be a glossary in the back spanning many hundreds of pages for ignorant readers like myself. Right now this book is for graduate students and academia whereas A Brief History of Time could almost be consumed by anyone who made it through the public school system.

I also sympathize with Koonin's herculean task because modern evolutionary studies seem relatively young compared to other fields like particle physics. As a result, Koonin must (and does) concede in some sections that there still exists largely debated theories. These debates often concern things about which we may never know the absolute truth like the branching factor of a tree of evolution on Earth some indeterminable time ago. As more and more prokaryotes and eukaryotes are added to their statistical algorithms, this may become clearer and yield revelations like the genetic makeup of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) and free this text of many pages devoted to questions surrounding such origins of life. But for now Koonin must tediously cover all his bases to introduce such things to the reader.

The book starts off by establishing the fundamentals of evolution up until the consolidation of Modern Synthesis. This includes purifying selection, drift, draft, fitness landscapes, etc until Darwinian Evolution was combined with genetics. At this point, the substrate of evolution (the genome) lead to evolutionary genomics. In particular Koonin concentrates on the statistics applied at the molecular level including distance methods, maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood, Bayesian inference and a similar analysis of phylogenetic methods. Koonin establishes early on that evolutionary research can no longer rely merely on phenotypic effects but rather there is a vast array of concrete changes happening at a molecular level.

The book moves on into comparative genomics and discusses extensively the intricate differences between the genomes of viruses, bacteria, archaea and eukaryota. Koonin exhaustively compares these groups through statistics and lays a brief foundation of relationships between genes. From this point on the book is heavily infested with the terminology of homologous, orthologous and paralogous genes. In addition to those the author discusses In-/Out-paralogous, co-orthologous and groups of orthologous (COG) genes. For people unfamiliar with this world, bookmarking and referring to Box 3-1 on page 56 is strongly advised. For the layperson, I believe an expansion of such a graphic would be a great addition to this book. Inside this part, the book also covers a simple but often misunderstood core piece of evolution and that is that evolution has the basic elementary events at the level of gene and genome evolution: substitution, deletion/loss, insertion, recombination/HGT and duplication. Over and over on Slashdot, I see comments that indicate a confusion or perception of evolution being one big monolithic thing. Koonin obviously reads or even studies a lot of other academic fields and tries to explain "the gene universe" as a space-time where there are a few dense clusters of core genes represented in most genomes but most of that space-time is occupied by a huge number of increasingly sparse "nebulae" consisting of rare genes. The author says of this universe: "This organization of the gene universe is distinctly fractal--that is, it appears at all scales of evolutionary distances."

As if that wasn't enough to prove that a definitive phenome narrative (what I alluded to earlier as desired) would be a bad idea, the next section moves on to systems biology and a heavier statistical look at genomics. Beyond the gene status (present or not present) exist two classes of variables: intensive evolutionary variables and extensive phenomic variables. At this point, we're not even talking about tangible things like eye or hair color but rather the underlying mechanisms to those sorts of things like proteins and how they are folded. Everywhere Koonin uses italics, the reader should pay special attention as I found these to be the most interesting key points (example: "Highly expressed genes evolve slowly"). In defining the nature of the evolutionary process, the author covers important concepts like fitness graphs that contain multiple local maxima to demonstrate how non-optimal progressions can occur. Furthermore this section makes it clear that adaptation is not the be-all end-all of evolution. The extensive discussion of the quantifiable properties of genome architecture, functioning and evolution are defined more so by non-adaptive, stochastic processes. Here (and in many later sections) Koonin attempts to use metaphors like Jacob's tinkering and ratchets to help the reader understand these complex concepts but I felt that these metaphors were still so far abstracted that the text could use anything linking these processes to tangible observations in organisms. Again I cannot hold this as a flaw for, after reading the book, it's clear that such a request would be viewed as sophomoric and evidence that I am unable to progress past The Origin of the Species (this book's key objective).

Koonin then moves on to the prokaryotic world and examines their genes and operons while paying special attention to an odd case: cyanobacteria. Most importantly in the prokaryotic domain, extensive comparative genomics has revealed a concept called horizontal gene transfer (HGT). I was personally hoping that Koonin would seize upon this novel concept and its importance in bacterial antibiotic resistance and how bacteria can evolve to dissolve novel compounds. For better or for worse, Koonin sticks to the pure purpose of this book and extensively covers important HGT discoveries like the convergence of protein sequences in similar groups of bacteria and archaea. Some selfish genes rely so heavily on horizontal mobility that they are dubbed "mobilomes" and Koonin discusses their aspects extensively. Darwin's Tree of Life concept was a very small eukaryotic part of the big picture that Koonin tries to re-invent as the "Forest of Life" or "Web of Life" (considering HGT). A whole chapter is devoted to discussing its properties and graphically visualizing its structure based on extensive surveys and what we know today.

From there the author discusses the origins of eukaryotes, Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (LECA), the branching factor of its evolution, its relative distance to the point of symbiogenesis in proposed evolutionary trees and the many competing theories about that tree. This section of the book spends considerable time examining the inferred origins of basic eukaryotic cell functioning and also discusses at length the archaeal roots of elaborate systems with the exception of the mitochondrion. This chapter also looks at the perplexing features of introns in eukaryotic genes. Koonin then tackles the misconceptions and abuses of the word complexity in all aspects of evolution. He applies information theory to the genetic code and notes that "information (entropy) tells us very little about the meaningful information content or complexity of a genomic sequence." It is then suggested that a new way to compute entropy and complexity is to examine the alignment of orthologous sequences instead of single sequences. For people interested in information theory, chapter eight is the most fruitful where Koonin proposes a computable formula for biological (evolutionary) information density. Like Claude Shannon's ability to infer many important aspects of communication, Koonin's modifications allow us to calculate that perceptually complex organisms possess more "entropic" genomes while perceptually less complex organisms like bacteria have the tightly packed and information dense "informational" genomes. After establishing these studies in information theory, Koonin is able to argue that neutrality of mutations that are fixed during evolution is the null hypothesis for all molecular evolutionary theories. All of this aids the author in discussing why evolution progressed passed single celled organisms that already had 1,000 to 1,500 genes to larger sets of genes in multicelled organisms.

Chapter nine tackles the modalities of Darwinian, Larmarckian and Wrightean evolutionary theories. This chapter improves upon the simplistic triad of heredity-variance-selection that defines Modern Synthesis by showing that the relationship between population size and environmental stress determines which of the three modalities is expressed the most in evolution while at the same time observing the importance of entropy (noise) at all levels of transmission. Koonin shows that by combining very well known molecular mechanisms we can achieve a complex scenario like Jean-Bapteste Lamarck's proposed modality of evolution. The text gives viruses the same treatment which, despite my assumption that they would be easier to analyze, appear to have many of the same complexities that prokaryotes and eukaryotes have. Possibly even more so given the effects of the Red Queen Hypothesis and all of the counterdefense genomes in some viruses. Furthermore the cellular empire and virus empires have two-way exchanges of genes. The truth is we know very little about the virus world — considering its size and history — and the author postulates that viromes in unknown and unstudied viruses consist largely of uncharacterized "dark matter" (again, borrowing terms from cosmologists).

Koonin then approaches the next logical step backwards: the last universal common ancestor (LUCA). He starts by listing the arguments that cellular life indeed had a common ancestor and looks at competing theories (for example cell organization complexity versus genetic complexity leading to different models of varying degrees of cellularity). In chapter twelve, Koonin covers the topic that is often the hardest to imagine — the origin of life. This is interesting and particularly difficult because the translation system itself at some point evolved. Interestingly enough, these 60 protein-coding genes and ~40 structural RNA genes are the only complex ensemble of genes that are conserved across all extant cellular life forms. So, of course, the point in the evolutionary tree where this had developed is discussed as well as the Darwin-Eigen cycle. The latter requiring a system of a far greater complexity in order to be started. So the author begins examining the proposition that over time and due to their catalytic properties ribozymes lead to processive synthesis of peptides (long enough to be the first proteins). After discussing the eleven stages this would have to encompass, the author discusses the existing skepticism of models that try to explain how replication and transcription came about. This chapter also tackles geochemical and chemical propositions on the origin of life — something that has been discussed on Slashdot before. This research centers on networks of inorganic compartments consisting of catalytic surfaces with gradients of heat and acidity that could have supported primordial organic chemistry.

The book ends with a chapter devoted to reiterating topics as well as asking important questions like whether or not another biological evolution model is necessary/feasible as well as caution against logic like the progress fallacy or criticizing a concept like "the selfish gene" because it sounds "undignified." Though these are tempting arguments because of their simplicity, they have proven fruitless. A diagram on page 412 reminds us just how complex the flow of genetic material is between the virus empire and the cellular empire.

There are two appendices to this book and, perhaps because they use a softer language, they were much more accessible to me yet posed more questions than answers. Appendix A concentrates on the philosophy of postmodernism, the infeasibility of synthesis and the distrust of metanarratives. The author argues that any paradigm presented must include oversimplification and that we merely replace them with better metanarratives. It is also important to ask these questions about the current paradigms for without them we would never have come up with drift, draft and various neutral ratchets to improve old models. Koonin references Hawking and Mlodinow with the concept of model-dependent realism which stresses that scientists merely construct models that are in turn swapped out for better models given how well they explain data and predict the outcomes of experiments. Lastly Koonin refers to Popper's famous falsification paradigm and his subsequent position on how invaluable evolution is purely on the grounds that it arms us to model and understand specific experiments. The second appendix deals with roughly estimating the probability of life arising given inflationary cosmology. I know this back of the envelope math has become popular given recent discoveries of exoplanets in the news but I felt the few references to the "many worlds in one" model deserved to be placed in a separate book. Nevertheless, Koonin covers both the strong and weak forms of the anthropic principle and looks at the connotations they hold for evolution.

The references at the end of this book are extensive — 38 pages of two line references. It should probably be mentioned that Koonin's references to his own work consist of two of these pages although at no point did it sound like he was unfairly proffering his theories over others. At certain points I had to wonder whether or not I was reading a lightly adjusted abstract from a peer reviewed paper or a book. This is most evident in one of the figures of an appendix on page 437 that reads "This is a formulation of the 'weak' anthropic principle adopted for the context of this paper." Since it is a graphic and in the appendix, it's forgivable but caused me to wonder if the rest of the book couldn't be more seamlessly tied together with transitionary language for novices like myself. Amazingly, I found maybe one grammatical error and no typos in this book which was a refreshing experience for a first edition. Also, this is one of the best bound books I've had the pleasure of reading, its spine has held up to hours of laying it flat open while I googled for a better understanding. While $50 is pricey, the book is built to last and this $10 premium over the kindle edition is worth it if you must hold a physical copy of a book. It saddened me to be reminded that some states struggle with including the core concepts of Darwinian evolution anywhere in their K-12 curriculum. And should those students desire to break new ground in this modern field, texts like The Logic of Chance are that much further away from them.

You can purchase The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page

Mozilla has announced the availability of a new beta version of Firefox for Android. The release notes list many of the new features and fixes, which include Flash support, improvements to panning and zooming, plugins loading only on touch, and a new "Awesome Screen." They point out that many Android phones are supported, and that a beta version for tablets will be coming soon. Mozilla is asking for help "testing everything from the faster startup and response times to compatibility for specific websites and graphics performance." Here's the download page.

udas writes "Two thirds of the world's population, 4 billion people, use cell phones today, and all of them have access to SMS. Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSM), set up in 1982, created the GSM standard, leading to a unified, open, standard-based mobile network. SMS, up to 160 7-bit character messages sent over control channels (when they aren't busy), was part of the original GSM specification itself. The first GSM handsts were approved for sale in May 1992. But it was not until 1996, when pay-as-you-go SIM cards showed up, and the kids got their hands on it, that SMS gained popularity."

bhagwad writes "Apparently Robert Scoble tried to post a long comment on Facebook only to have a message pop up saying 'This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can't be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.' If true, this is huge. For one the self-moderating system of comments has always been the rule so far. And with countries like India rooting for the pre-screening of content and comments, is Facebook thinking of caving into these demands?" Facebook says there's a more innocuous explanation: namely, that the comment triggered a spam filter.

First time accepted submitter wokie78 writes "The PlanetSolar, a Swiss solar powered catamaran, has just arrived to Monaco (French original), its initial port of departure, after finishing its voyage around the world which it started in September 2010. Its five-member crew completed a 60,006 km trip fully powered by 537 square meters of solar panels, which produced from 500 to 600 kw/h in fair weather — which meant it could go for 300 km on a single charge. Everything on the boat was solar powered."

Cryophallion writes "After many years of development, GIMP 2.8 is finally released. Among its features: the oft-desired single-window mode, layer groups, and many other massive improvements, including some of the GIMP UI team's work. This might be the release that helps make The GIMP a much more user friendly experience for newcomers, and has features that are rivaling those of certain exceptionally expensive commercial programs. While the porting of GEGL is still ongoing (and recently reported to have made massive advances made), this is a major step forward for one of the premier open source projects." Here are the official release notes.

New submitter drom writes "Google released a key part of their Street View pipeline as open source on Tuesday: Ceres Solver. It's a large-scale nonlinear least squares minimizer. What does that mean? It's a way to fit a model (like expected position of a car) to data (like GPS positions or accelerometers). The library is completely general and works for many problems. It offers state of the art performance for bundle adjustment problems typical in 3D reconstruction, among others."

An anonymous reader writes "More bad news comes from Apple's iDevice manufacturing partner Foxconn that is sure to ruffle the feathers of Apple fans. From the story: 'Factory workers at a Foxconn plant in Jundiaí, Brazil are complaining of overcrowded buses, poor food and a lack of water and have threatened to strike unless the issues are resolved by May 3. According to a report by Brazil's Tech Guru (Google Translation), over 2,500 Foxconn employees have complained about conditions at the factory. Workers reportedly met last Monday to raise the concerns and have given the company 10 days to address them.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "AP reports that when a Delta Airlines flight touched down at Midway International Airport in Chicago, the passengers looked out the window to see the jet surrounded by fire trucks, police cars and ambulances. Health officials came through the door wearing facemasks and other protective gear. As it turns out the bedbugs that infest hotels appear to be the source of red marks on a 50-year old Minnesota woman that prompted health officials to quarantine the jet for fear they were dealing with something much more serious: monkeypox. Lise Sievers called her mother during a layover in Detroit and told her that one of the children she visited and is trying to adopt in Uganda had some pus-filled red bumps and also mentioned she had some small bumps of her own, a rash that she suspected was the handiwork of bedbugs. Those two very different bumps — one with pus, one without — got jumbled up in Siever's mother's mind, and she called a hospital near her Indiana home to ask about treatment for her daughter. 'She told them her daughter is on a flight back from Uganda and has some red bumps which are pussing and what should she do to treat them,' says Roger Sievers. 'She was looking for some general advice.' Health officials feared they were looking for monkeypox, a rare and sometimes fatal disease mostly in found in central and western Africa. After the passengers waited on the plane for a couple of hours, officials brought good news. 'They came back down and told my mom it was bed bug bites and they started releasing people.'"

suraj.sun writes "Microsoft quietly fixed a flaw in Hotmail's password reset system that allowed anyone to reset the password of any Hotmail account last Friday. The company was notified of the flaw by researchers at Vulnerability Lab on April 20th and responded with a fix within hours — but not until after widespread attacks, with the bug apparently spreading 'like wild fire' in the hacking community. Hotmail's password reset system uses a token system to ensure that only the account holder can reset their password — a link with the token is sent to an account linked to the Hotmail account — and clicking the link lets the account owner reset their password. However, the validation of these tokens isn't handled properly by Hotmail, allowing attackers to reset passwords of any account. Initially hackers were offering to crack accounts for $20 a throw. However, the technique became publicly known and started to spread rapidly with Web and YouTube tutorials showing the technique popping up across the Arabic-speaking Internet."

Mojo66 writes "A recently reported flaw that allowed an attacker to drastically reduce the number of attempts needed to guess the WPS PIN of a wireless router isn't necessary for some Arcadyan based routers anymore. According to German computer publisher Heise, some 100,000 routers of type Speedport W921V, W504V and W723V are affected in Germany alone. (Google translation, original here.) What makes things worse is the fact that in order to exploit the backdoor, no button has to be pushed on the device itself and on some of the affected routers, the backdoor PIN ("12345670") is still working even after WPS has been disabled by the user. The only currently known remedy for those models is to disable Wi-Fi altogether. Since all Arcadyan routers share the same software platform, more models might be affected."

cosm writes "With public outcry against the TSA continuing to spread, the TSA is defending a recent episode in which a four-year-old was patted down while kicking and screaming at Wichita Airport in Kansas. From the AP article: 'The grandmother of a 4-year-old girl who became hysterical during a security screening at a Kansas airport said Wednesday that the child was forced to undergo a pat-down after hugging her, with security agents yelling and calling the crying girl an uncooperative suspect.'"

betterunixthanunix writes "Another remailer has been compromised by the FBI, who made a forensic image of the hard disk of a remailer located in Austria. The remailer operator has reissued the remailer keys, but warns that messages previously sent through the remailer could be decrypted. The operator also warns that law enforcement agents had an opportunity to install a back door, and that a complete rebuild of the system will take some time."

lemmen writes "As widely expected, Google Drive has launched officially today. Google Drive is free for the first 5GB, while you can get an upgrade to 25GB for $2.50 a month. They say the service is available for PCs, Macs, Android devices, and soon iOS devices. According to Mercury News, '... the success of Drive will ride largely on whether Google can differentiate its offering from already established fast-growing cloud storage startups that were in the market first, such as Dropbox and Box, as well as Microsoft's SkyDrive service and big consumer media competitors like Apple's iCloud and Amazon's Cloud Drive. ... Existing Google Docs files, the centerpiece of Google's existing cloud storage offering, will move to the Google Drive service once users download apps and install the new service."

suraj.sun writes with news that a new patent suit has been filed against Apple over all of the company's touch-based products. From the article: "According to the complaint (PDF), Professor Slavoljub Milekic conceived a system that used a touchscreen that allowed children to move virtual objects around the screen, which he used to build interactive displays for the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, in 1997, and filed for a patent on his design that same year. The patent in the suit, U.S. Patent #6,920,619 named 'User interface for removing an object from a display,' was issued by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in 2005. According to the lawsuit, Milekic formed FlatWorld Interactives in 2007 to 'promote and commercialize' his invention. Curiously, FlatWorld was incorporated on January 2007, just weeks after Apple announced the original iPhone at Macworld Expo. In July 2007, just after Apple shipped the original iPhone, FlatWorld filed a reissue request for the patent, which appears to have been done in order to modify some of the patent's dependent claims."

udas writes "The Millennium Technology Prize is awarded every two years for a technological innovation that significantly improves the quality of human life, today and in the future. This year, Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, maker of a new way to create stem cells without the use of embryonic stem cells, are both laureates for the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize. This prize, which is determined by the Technology Academy of Finland, is one of the world's largest such prizes with candidates sought from across the world and from all fields of technology. The two innovators will share over a million Euros. The final winner will be announced by the President of the Republic of Finland in a special ceremony on June 13, 2012."

CAPSLOCK2000 writes "The Dutch Pirate Party (PPNL) just won a court-case against BREIN. Last week BREIN got a court to issue an emergency order to take down a reverse-proxy to The Pirate Bay. The next day BREIN claimed the court order also included a generic proxy also ran by PPNL and any other service that might lead to TPB (aka hyperlinks). PPNL responded with an emergency lawsuit of their own, asking for a literal interpretation of the verdict instead of BREIN's broad reading. The judge acknowledged the narrow interpretation of the verdict. proxy.piratenpartij.nl stays up and tpb.piratenpartij.nl now sports a list of other ways to reach The Pirate Bay. Due to the Streisand effect this list has grown to a considerable length. Noteworthy is that The Pirate Party got favorable verdict in a single day, a first in Dutch law." Full verdict (in Dutch). This is only a temporary order by the judge to keep the general-purpose proxy run by the Pirate Party and the list of alternative proxies to the Pirate Bay online. A full case hearing is expected on April 24th.

Spy Handler writes "NASA announced today a tentative April 30th date for SpaceX launch to the International Space Station on an unmanned cargo mission. 'Everything looks good as we head toward the April 30 launch date,' said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations. If successful, SpaceX will become the first private company to launch a space vehicle and dock with the ISS."

New submitter omar.sahal writes "Bret Victor demoed the idea of instant feedback on your code. ... Allowing the programmer to instantly see what his program is doing. Chris Granger has turned this novel idea into Light Table — a new IDE designed to make use of Victor's insights." The screenshots make this look like it could be genuinely useful — like a much fancier and more functional combination of features from SLIME and Speedbar. There's a Google group for those wanting to track development. There's no code yet, but source is promised: "I can guarantee you that Light Table will be built on top of the technologies that are freely available to us today. As such, I believe it only fair that the core of Light Table be open sourced once it is launched, while some of the plugins may remained closed source."

Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that nobody would describe North Korea's mission control as imposing. It is a small, unremarkable, two-story building, tiny compared to Nasa's Houston home in America or Russia's space command. But the North's secretive regime, now headed by the third of the Kim dynasty to rule here, Kim Jong-un, is opening up, for the first time in an attempt to allay fears it is about to test missile technology that could deliver a warhead as far as America. 'Sixteen technicians man the satellite command center. Dressed in white coats, like doctors, they sit behind computer screens,' writes Damian Grammaticas. 'On a big screen are live pictures from the launch pad, showing North Korea's rocket being fueled up. The satellite it will carry has already been loaded on board, we are told.' Pyongyang says the minibar refrigerator-sized satellite covered with solar panels and golden foil to protect its instruments will broadcast martial music praising North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung and is designed to monitor weather, natural disasters and agriculture patterns. As the five-day window for North Korea's rocket launch opens today, the United States has warned a launch would be a breach of UN Security Council resolutions that ban the North from testing missile technology. If North Korea goes ahead it could lead to UN sanctions, it has warned. 'That's why we have invited you, to clearly show that this is a satellite launch not a ballistic missile,' says Paek Chang-ho, head of the satellite control center. 'I hope you become supporters in showing the transparency of our satellite launch.'" After all that North Korea decided to launch a missile anyway. From the article: "The three-stage rocket, called the Unha-3, blasted off from the Soehae launch site near North Korea’s western corner with China, at about 7:39 a.m., the South Korea Defense Ministry said."

MrKevvy writes "The Tennessee 'Teaching the Controversy' bill was passed into law today. 'A law to allow public school teachers to challenge the scientific consensus on issues like climate change and evolution will soon take effect in Tennessee. State governor Bill Haslam allowed the bill — passed by the state House and Senate — to become law without signing it, saying he did not believe the legislation "changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools."'" The governor adds: "However, I also don’t believe that it accomplishes anything that isn’t already acceptable in our schools."

samazon writes "North Carolina State University researcher Jag Kasichainula has developed a 'heat spreader' to cool electronics more efficiently using a copper-graphene composite, which is attached using an indium-graphene interface film. According to Kasichainula, the technique will cool 25% faster than pure copper and will cost less to produce than the copper plate heat spreaders currently used by most electronics (abstract). Better performance at a lower cost? Let's hope so."

theodp writes "On April Fools' Day, Google joked it was partnering with NASCAR on self-driving cars. Google Racing, the search giant joshed, had its roots in Project Caddy, which demonstrated the viability of self-driving golf carts. And in the future, Google added tongue-in-cheek, your kids will travel unattended in driverless-car car pools. Funny stuff, huh? Only thing is, GeekWire reports the USPTO disclosed Thursday that Google actually has a patent pending for driverless golf carts, as well as cars that can autonomously pick up kids from school and be switched into 'sport mode,' where 'the vehicle may navigate through turns at the maximum speed that is safe.' In addition to cars, trucks and golf carts, Google's patent application calls dibs on autonomous busses, boats, airplanes, helicopters, lawnmowers, recreational vehicles, amusement park vehicles, trams, trains, and trolleys. Google also describes how its invention will enable autonomous police cars to conduct high speed chases and give law enforcement vehicles 'a limited amount of control over nearby vehicles.' So, is the patent application legit, or did Google team up with the USPTO on a belated April Fools' goof?"

Inspired by work on work on non-traditional presentations in KDE's Karbon (part of Calligra), Aditya Bhatt set out to create a purely client-side tool for creating animated presentations in the browser. Based upon svg-edit and using Sozi, the initial results are pretty cool. His weblog post documents the process — the choice of SVG versus html5's canvas, Javascript instead of SMIL, etc. highlighting the challenges faced even today with different browsers offering wildly different levels of support for each web technology. The sourcecode for Awwation can be had over at Github.

itwbennett writes "Larry Page just wants to be loved. Well, he wants 'Google to be a company that is deserving of great love,' Page wrote in a public letter. But he also wants to offer the kind of personalized service that the requires trampling on your privacy. 'The recent changes we made to our privacy policies generated a lot of interest. But they will enable us to create a much better, more intuitive experience across Google — our key focus for the year,' Page wrote." From the letter: "Think about basic actions like sharing or recommendations. When you find a great article, you want to share that knowledge with people who will find it interesting, too. If you see a great movie, you want to recommend it to friends. Google+ makes sharing super easy by creating a social layer across all our products so users connect with the people who matter to them." With all the claims of altruistic intent in the open letter, one might wonder why Google has to push their own social network instead of working on open protocols for sharing.

According to an annual report by Dean Headley, a business professor at Wichita State University, flying is getting slowly better. Lost bag reports, delayed flights, service complaints and cases of getting bumped from your flight were all slightly down in 2011. From the article: "Hawaiian Airlines did the best job of arriving on time with an average of 92.8 percent, while JetBlue Airways had the worst on-time performance, 73.3 percent. A flight is considered on time if it arrives within 15 minutes of when it was originally due. Nearly half the 15 airlines improved their on-time arrival performance in 2011, and seven had an on-time arrival percentage over 80 percent — Hawaiian, Southwest Airlines, AirTran Airways, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and Mesa Airlines. The average on-time performance for the industry was 80 percent last year, just a tad better than 2010's average of 79.8 percent."

First time accepted submitter nachiketas points out this story about a new online service offered by the Taliban. "Worried about whether Islamic verses on Facebook are allowed? Or that suicide bombers kill innocent civilians? Afghanistan's Taliban have set up a new question-and-answer section on their website to address such issues. The facility on Voice of Jihad, the official website of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan — the Taliban's own name for their movement — allows readers to submit queries to spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. It is a demonstration of how far the insurgents' attitude towards technology has changed."

AbsoluteXyro writes "Today users of Google Maps will notice a new mapping option — 'Quest' — alongside the usual 'Map' and 'Satellite' views. Quest view renders the planet in a retro 8-bit fantasy video game style, including renders of famous landmarks such as the White House and the Eiffel Tower. Even Pegman gets in on the game, now taking on the appearance of a sword wielding 8-bit adventurer, allowing you to witness Street View through 8-bit eyes. Basically, imagine a fully functioning Google Maps on an NES."

mdsolar writes "Climate change is amplifying risks from drought, floods, storms and rising seas, threatening all countries, but small island states, poor nations and arid regions in particular, UN experts warned on Tuesday. In its first-ever report on the question, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said man-made global-warming gases are already affecting some types of extreme weather. And, despite gaps in knowledge, weather events once deemed a freak are likely to become more frequent or more vicious, inflicting a potentially high toll in deaths, economic damage and misery, it said."

Hugh Pickens writes "AFP reports that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos plans to retrieve the F-1 engines that rocketed astronaut Neil Armstrong and his crew toward the moon in 1969. 'We're making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor,' Bezos wrote in his blog at BezosExpeditions.com. 'We don't know yet what condition these engines might be in — they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they're made of tough stuff, so we'll see.' Bezos wrote that he was five years old when Armstrong made history during the Apollo 11 mission by becoming the first person to set foot on the moon, and 'without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.' Bezos stressed that he is using private funds to try to raise the F-1 engines from their resting places 14,000 feet (4,267 meters) below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, and that they remain the property of NASA. 'I imagine that NASA would decide to make it available to the Smithsonian (National Air and Space Museum) for all to see.' Bezos's efforts come just days after Titanic director James Cameron became the first person in 40 years to descend to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the ocean's deepest point, in a privately-funded expedition."

Velcroman1 writes "'This is some of the best driving I've ever done,' Steve Mahan said the other day. Mahan was behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius tooling the small California town of Morgan Hill in late January, a routine trip to pick up the dry cleaning and drop by the Taco Bell drive-in for a snack. He also happens to be 95 percent blind. Mahan, head of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center, 'drove' along a specially programmed route thanks to Google's autonomous driving technology. Google announced the self-driving car project in 2010. It relies upon laser range finders, radar sensors, and video cameras to navigate the road ahead, in order to make driving safer, more enjoyable and more efficient — and clearly more accessible. In a Wednesday afternoon post on Google+, the company noted that it has hundreds of thousands of miles of testing under its belt, letting the company feel confident enough in the system to put Mahan behind the wheel."

New submitter inhuman_4 passes along this quote from an article at Wired: "Last December, Microsoft scored a victory when the ITC Administrative Law Judge Theodore R. Essex found that Motorola had violated four Microsoft patents. But the ruling could also eliminate an important Microsoft software patent that has been invoked in lawsuits against Barnes & Noble and car navigation device-maker Tom Tom. According to Linus Torvalds, he was deposed in the case this past fall, and apparently his testimony about a 20-year-old technical discussion — along with a discussion group posting made by an Amiga fan, known only as Natuerlich! — helped convince the Administrative Law Judge that the patent was invalid."

New submitter inhuman_4 passes along this quote from an article at Wired: "Last December, Microsoft scored a victory when the ITC Administrative Law Judge Theodore R. Essex found that Motorola had violated four Microsoft patents. But the ruling could also eliminate an important Microsoft software patent that has been invoked in lawsuits against Barnes & Noble and car navigation device-maker Tom Tom. According to Linus Torvalds, he was deposed in the case this past fall, and apparently his testimony about a 20-year-old technical discussion — along with a discussion group posting made by an Amiga fan, known only as Natuerlich! — helped convince the Administrative Law Judge that the patent was invalid."

New submitter Mojo66 writes "Mayor Ude reported today that the city of Munich has saved €4 million so far (Google translation of German original) by switching its IT infrastructure from Windows NT and Office to Linux and OpenOffice. At the same time, the number of trouble tickets decreased from 70 to 46 per month. Savings were €2.8M from software licensing and €1.2M from hardware because demands are lower for Linux compared to Windows 7."

hackingbear writes "Reports from overseas (in Chinese) [Google translation] and Hong Kong-based Chinese media report that China appears to have unblocked several sensitive political keywords. Using Baidu.com, the country's leading search engine, users within the mainland border find, in Chinese, uncensored web page links and images using keywords like Tiananmen and 'June 4'. (Readers can click on the first one to view the images.) Given that the unblocking of these sensitive keywords comes one week after Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao publicly denounced left-wing leader Bo Xilai's movement of 'striking down the ganster while reviving the red culture' as going down the path of Cultural Revolution, it could signal the silent start of a major political change."

eldavojohn writes "With the release of GCC 4.7.0, the venerable and stalwart constant that is the GNU Compiler Collection turns twenty five. More ISO standards and architectures supported with this release and surely more memories to come from the compiler that seems to have always been."

First time accepted submitter asadsalm writes "MacOS has spaces. Windows had no out-of-the-box utility for multiple virtual desktops. Which Multiple Desktop Tool should one use on Windows 7? Sysinternals Desktops, mdesktop, Dexpot, Virtual Dimension, VirtuaWin, Finestra are the few options that I have shortlisted." So, if you use both Windows and multiple desktops, what's your favorite method?

First time accepted submitter asadsalm writes "MacOS has spaces. Windows had no out-of-the-box utility for multiple virtual desktops. Which Multiple Desktop Tool should one use on Windows 7? Sysinternals Desktops, mdesktop, Dexpot, Virtual Dimension, VirtuaWin, Finestra are the few options that I have shortlisted." So, if you use both Windows and multiple desktops, what's your favorite method?

Nuclear fusion power is the process of fusing light nuclei together to release energy, and ultimately, to put electricity on the grid. Today, we have six researchers from MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center here to answer your questions about fusion power, tokamaks, and public support and funding in the U.S. for this research. The Obama Administration's budget request for fiscal year 2013 is paying for the U.S. share of ITER construction out of the domestic program, starting with the closure of the MIT fusion lab. The interviewees are ready to answer technical and policy questions, so don't be shy! And, as always, please break unrelated questions into separate posts. Read on for information about the researchers who will answer your questions. Dr. Martin Greenwald is a Senior Scientist and Associate Director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. His experimental work focuses on turbulence and transport, density limits, and pellet fueling of magnetically confined plasmas. More recently, Dr. Greenwald has been heavily involved with data management, computation, simulation, networks, and remote collaborations for fusion research.

Professor Ian Hutchinson is interested in plasma control in tokamaks, as well as spatially resolved measurements of the radiated power coming from the plasma. He is the author of the standard fusion textbook Principles of Plasma Diagnostics. Prof. Hutchinson also works on particle-in-cell simulations of astrophysical and laboratory plasmas.

Assistant Professor Anne White researches turbulence phenomena on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, developing new diagnostics to resolve the small fluctuations which cause energy and particles to leak out. She is the recent recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award.

Professor Dennis Whyte pursues research into plasma–material interactions; that is, the way the hot plasma in a magnetic fusion reactor interacts with the surrounding solid materials walls. His team is also developing novel diagnostics for fusion nuclear science, which is critical as fusion reactors start producing power (and neutrons) over long periods of time.

Nathan Howard and Geoff Olynyk are Ph.D students on the Alcator C-Mod project. Nathan, who is in the final year of his studies, studies turbulent transport phenomena experimentally and through simulation. Geoff, in his fourth year, is working on disruption mitigation, which is a way to quickly and safely shut a tokamak plasma down in a few thousandths of a second.

eldavojohn writes "Apparently the Samsung and Apple patent hoedown has received some uninvited guests that wish to troll with the big trolls — all over a built-in button for an emoticon. According to Varia Holdings (don't bother googling, you won't find anyone trying to license their patents to you) 'by asserting [its European] emoticon patent against Apple, Samsung has recognized the value of the type of invention embodied in [Varia's] '731 Patent.' And, thusly, Varia feels this provides grounds to sue Samsung and RIM. Techdirt provides commentary on the obviousness of said patent while raking the USPTO examiner over the coals (although, curiously, gives Samsung a free pass)."

An anonymous reader writes "On Thursday Felix Baumgartner climbed into a capsule carried by a balloon, floated up to 71,500 feet, and jumped out. He free-fell through the atmosphere for almost four minutes, hitting an estimated top speed of 364 mph. 'I wanted to open the parachute after descending for a while but I noticed that I was still at an altitude of 50,000ft,' he said. After finally deploying his chute, he fell for a bit over four more minutes, before successfully touching down in the New Mexico Desert. This was a test to prepare him for a jump of 120,000 feet later this summer, during which Baumgartner will break the record for highest free-fall jump — and the sound barrier. '... a 36-pound spacesuit is all that separates Baumgartner from a hostile world that would boil the blood in his body. Baumgartner will wear a chest pack crammed with data-hungry instruments to help ground controllers monitor the attempt — and log scientific data. Some will keep tabs on his heart rate and oxygen intake to see how a body in a spacesuit reacts to a boundary no one has broken (and lived to tell the tale): the speed of sound.'"

New submitter BSAtHome writes "People with a healthy interest in fundamental freedoms and basic human rights have probably heard about SABAM, the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, which has become one of the global poster children for how outrageously out-of-touch-with-reality certain rightsholders groups appear to be. This morning, word got out in Belgian media that SABAM is spending time and resources to contact local libraries across the nation, warning them that they will start charging fees because the libraries engage volunteers to read books to kids. Volunteers. Who – again – read books to kids."

theodp writes "Microsoft, reports GeekWire, is seeking a patent on monetizing the buttons of your TV remote. In its application for a patent on 'Control-based Content Pricing,' Microsoft explains how one can jack up the cable bill of those who dare fast-forward past a diaper commercial or replay a sports highlight. From the patent application: 'If a user initiates a navigation control input to advance past (e.g., skip over) an advertisement, the cost of a requested on-demand movie may be increased. Similarly, if a user initiates a replay of a sporting event, the user may be charged for the replay control input and for each subsequent view control input.'"

lbalbalba writes "A location message sent from a stolen iPad by an anti-theft application turns out to be insufficient evidence to issue a search warrant for the Dutch authorities. A Dutch man reported his iPad as stolen to the Dutch authorities last month. Despite the fact that the rightful owner was able to locate his iPad within hours of the theft, thanks to the anti-theft application he had installed, the Dutch authorities did not issue a warrant to perform a search. According to the prosecutors, a search warrant is 'a very heavy measure,' that should only be used when there is 'sufficient suspicion.' The theft report by the owner was viewed as 'no objective evidence' in the case."

First time accepted submitter X10 writes "Google announced some time ago that they want only developers to attend their Google IO conference. They hinted at developing a 'programming test' that you have to pass before you can register. Now, they have introduced the Input Output machine at the same time they announced that Google IO registration will open on March 27. I take it that registrations will be ordered according to the quality of one's IO machine. Cute idea ..."

Michael J. Ross writes "Prior to Google+, the company's previous attempts at social networking — Orkut, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Wave, and Buzz — were largely failures, and tended to frustrate users who had devoted time and effort to contributing content and establishing connections with other users, only to see the services wither on the vine. In contrast, Google+ appears to be receiving far more nurturing by the Internet behemoth, and as a result has arguably better chances of not just surviving, but expanding to the point of eventually challenging Twitter and Facebook. Like its rivals, Google+ offers online help information to explain to newcomers the basics of how to use the service. But there is little to no advice on how to make the most of its capabilities, and even the basic functionality is not always clearly explained. That is the purpose of a new book, Google+: The Missing Manual." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review. Google+: The Missing Manual author Kevin Purdy pages 232 pages publisher O'Reilly Media rating 7/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1449311872 summary An introduction to Google's social networking service. Authored by Kevin Purdy, the book was published by O'Reilly Media, on 30 December 2011, under the ISBN 978-1449311872. The publisher's page has a brief description of the book, its table of contents, some comments on the book from customers and reviewers, a couple errata (as of this writing), and links for purchasing the print version (such as the one kindly provided to me by the publisher) and/or the e-book versions (in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF formats). The "missing CD" page has links to most if not all of the online resources mentioned in the text.

Like the other entries in the Missing Manual series, this one starts with the basics, and builds upon that foundation. It does not assume any knowledge of Google+, or even possession of a Google account.

The book's material is organized into nine chapters, for a total of 232 pages. The first chapter, "Getting Started," explains exactly how to join Google+, invite friends to your new network, and configure your profile, including your privacy settings and a photo (even tweaking it online). The second chapter, "Managing Contacts with Circles" covers how to create new circles, edit and organize existing ones, share them with other Google+ users, and find people to add to your circles. But, oddly, the information is not presented in that logical order. The author explicates the advantages of using more than the default four circles provided by Google. Some points are repeated, but briefly enough that it is inconsequential.

While the first two chapters lay the foundation for joining Google+ and setting up your account and circles, the next three chapters explore the details of using this service — starting with "Streams, Sharing, and Privacy," which explains the various types of streams (main, circle, Notification, and the now-defunct Incoming stream), as well as the user interface elements for those streams and the individual posts they comprise. The author also demonstrates how to write your own posts, specify who gets to see them, edit your posts, and interact with the posts submitted by other users. The next chapter explores the important topic of notifications, which are sent as e-mail messages, smartphone messages, etc. Helpfully, the author discusses the differences between the user interfaces of the Android and iPhone notification apps. The subsequent chapter fully explains how to share photos and videos with other Google+ users, as well as how to upload and perform basic editing of images. However, it may have been more logical to present the latter information before the former.

For people who want the capabilities previously only provided by commercial web conferencing services, hangouts might be the most welcome feature of Google+. Chapter 6 explains how to set up and participate in these videos/audio meetings online, as well as how to incorporate Google Chat, YouTube videos, and Android devices. The subsequent chapter, "Searching and Sparks," has plenty of advice on how to search for other Google+ users and the content they contribute. The penultimate chapter dives into the differences you may encounter when using Google+ on small screen devices — specifically, Android and Apple smartphones and tablets. The last chapter, which is the briefest of the bunch, is also likely to prove the least useful to most readers, as it covers how to get started playing the games built into Google+.

The book does not cover Google+ Pages, which was likely introduced after the final draft of the book was submitted to the publisher. Readers are directed to an untitled 14-page PDF file that covers the essentials of Google+ Pages. Oddly, the publisher's page links to that file with the text "Download Example Code"; but there is no example code for this book. The supplement contains a few flaws: "box pop-up box" (page 4), "using a promoting your Page" (9), and "his her name" (11).

Speaking of which, given the relatively modest number of pages in this book, and the limited amount of text on each one, this book contains far too many errata: "works different" (page xiii; echoes of Apple's infernal "Think Different" marketing campaign?), "If typing web addresses by hand that isn't" (page 3), "a different a social networking site" (4), "she's added you [to] her" (54), "added to [the] +Add box" (58), "even if [you] just" (79), "and the[n] click the" (79), "settings that lets you can choose" (83), "modicum [of] more fuss" (105), "share its photos [with] specific circles" (117), "where [the] photo" (124), "just like [the] lightbox view" (126), "and or" (147; should read "and/or"), "an job" (148), "how to [use?] Google+ running" (169), "search find" (170), "bring up to the same list" (180), "The form exact" (185; should read "The exact form"), "you can't get start" (191), "in in" (193), and "a box let you know" (194).

Some of the statements in the narrative are odd — for instance, "Halloween right around October 31" (page 7; when else would Halloween occur?). Other phrases are poorly worded — for instance, "whenever you feel irked or like something must be broken" (44), "maybe an extra like a link" (60), and "select an item from the menu that appears to see only circle-related notifications" (80). Lastly, at least one pair of verbs have inconsistent form ("start" and "mentioning" on page 62). All of these blemishes should have been caught by the copyediting crew. But for the most part, the narrative is straightforward. It is occasionally livened up with a bit of humor, which is good, because portions of the text begin to sound the same, as a result not so much of the author's writing, but more the Google+ interface itself.

Only a few technical errors are immediately evident — for instance, on page 61, the author refers to a for-loop in computer code incorrectly: "+1 is a common way of making a program run over and over again." But it is not a program that is being repeated, but rather a code block.

Scattered throughout the text are numerous text boxes — most of which are labeled "Note" or "Tip." Unfortunately, they are set in a font that is a bit too small for comfortable reading. Also, there does not appear to be any difference among these types of information sections, yet there are at least half a dozen different names for them.

All of the key topics are nicely illustrated with sample screenshots, in grayscale, oftentimes with relevant controls circled or otherwise indicated. The only weakness is that the author typically does not mention which figure is being referenced in the text — not that that would help much anyway, since none of them have figure numbers. It's usually clear from the context, but not always.

Yet the very existence of this book may give readers some pause: If a book of this size is required to explain how to use a social networking service aimed at the general public, perhaps the Google+ user interface needs to be overhauled and made more intuitive? Yet that process is probably underway, because Google+ is under constant revision. Thus there will be portions of the text and screenshots that differs somewhat from the current incarnation of the user interface and its features. But for most of these instances, it is easy enough to determine how what you read in the book correlates with what you might see on the screen.

The primary weakness of this book is that it does not attempt to explain how Google+ might be integrated into a business's online marketing strategy, nor how it compares against Facebook or Twitter in terms of its advantages and disadvantages. In fact, as noted above, the book addresses Google+ Pages only in a supplementary document. Such information would have made this entry in the Missing Manual series far more valuable.

However, one forte of this book is that the author has clearly put effort into learning and explaining the privacy implications of the various Google+ features — critical in this era of evaporating privacy and data breaches on an unprecedented scale.

On balance, he largely achieves his objective. Google+: The Missing Manual is an informative and approachable introduction to Google's social network.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance web developer and writer.

You can purchase Google+: The Missing Manual from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

sl4shd0rk writes "Hackers can now build applications directly on their Android devices with the beta release of AIDE. The Android IDE is at beta version 7, and already allows editing and compiling of apps as well as integration with LogCat. AIDE is even compatible with projects started on Eclipse so you can move a project over and work on it. Finally, a reason to get yourself that Transformer keyboard dock?" sl4shd0rk also provided a screencast which is attached. InfoQ has a short interview with the developers. Mildly interesting is that it does the compilation on device instead of shipping the work off to some network service or other. The app is, like a lot of Android stuff, only free cost with no corresponding source code at the moment.

An anonymous reader writes "Adoption of the HTML5 video element has been hampered by the lack of a universal video format that is supported in all browsers. Mozilla previously rejected the popular H.264 video codec because it is patent-encumbered and would require implementors to pay royalty fees. The organization is now rethinking its position and is preparing to add support for H.264 video decoding in mobile Firefox via codecs that are provided by the underlying operating system or hardware. The controversial proposal has attracted a lot of criticism from Firefox contributors, including some employed by Mozilla."

New submitter hinterwaeldler writes "In 2007 Switzerland abandoned book price control (which requires publishers to fix prices for their books and forbids any dealer to sell at another price), reducing prices by 30% to 50% for online buyers. The brick & mortar book stores lobbied the parliament into creating a bill to reinstate the price fixing, against which a referendum was taken by liberals and the Pirate Party, forcing a popular vote. On March 11, after an intense debate, Swiss voters decided against book price control (German-language original) with a majority of 56%."